


The Void Is Empty And The God Is Here

by adrift_me



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canonical Character Death, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Post-DotO, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-08
Updated: 2018-04-08
Packaged: 2019-04-20 08:10:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,839
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14256669
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/adrift_me/pseuds/adrift_me
Summary: What if Corvo Attano has kept the Twin-Bladed knife when it fell to his possession in Dunwall some years ago? What if it is at his hand that the Eyeless and the Envisioned fall? And what if begging Daud to whisper the Outsider's name is Corvo's priority, as well as to hold the said god, now freed, in his arms?





	The Void Is Empty And The God Is Here

**Author's Note:**

> I replayed DOTO and I have feels again. I hope you like this!
> 
>  
> 
> [Come chat with me on tumblr :)](https://a-driftamongopenstars.tumblr.com/ask)

It was a most surreal encounter, Corvo recollects, stretched on the bunkbed of the Dreadful Wale. An encounter that led to him being here, staring at the ceiling and wondering if turning back is still an option. He can almost imagine the distant disappearing sights of Dunwall as the ship is sailing away, taking him back to Karnaca, back to a place where everything seems to begin.

And at the roots of it all - Billie Lurk. The Outsider. Daud.

Corvo can’t call him a mortal enemy. Can’t call him a friend either, there is too much blood spillt between either them for it to ever become a friendship. But temporary partnership on the path to a greater good? It might just be it.

He is not looking forward to seeing him again. Every memory of that fine scarred face makes his insides twist and burn with anger, even if over a decade has passed since the assassin deprived the world of their Empress. But Billie Lurk, the other guilty party, has managed to persuade Corvo to come to Karnaca, to join them, bring the weapon he has been jealously guarding and hiding from the unknowing Overseers. If they were ever to catch wind of the Royal Protector, keeping the Twin-Bladed Knife in his possession, there would be no trial, only an execution. Even if Corvo saved this knife from a dangerous man when he attempted to use it against the Empire.

And the Empire can be quite unforgiving.

The ship creaks pleasantly, lulling Corvo to sleep, even as his mind swims with memories of both coups he has lived through, of Daud’s voice in his ears, of Delilah’s spirit in his hands, of the Outsider’s guidance…

The Outsider. Corvo sits up straight at the memory of his god, panting and sweating a little. The air is chill and is buzzing a little. Something familiar, and it’s letting Corvo know that the trickster god has gifted him with a visit.

The rocks of the Void are trembling under Corvo’s feet as he walks up the ledges and peaks, sharp triangles of it leading him elsewhere, away and away from the Dreadful Wale’s wreckage with his room alone intact. The Outsider is nowhere to be seen, but his presence is so strong and vibrating, that Corvo has no trouble recognizing where the god would appear. And he does.

“Another venture, Corvo, and our paths collide. This time, so many paths, all converged into one single moment in time that promises death and life. I am hopeful that whichever comes upon us will also mean freedom. Have you considered the sanity of you joining Billie Lurk and Daud on their trip to destroy me?”

Corvo looks at the Outsider, and there is something new beneath that mask of arrogance and vague air. There is fear.

“I didn’t come to destroy you. I came to save you from them and them from themselves.”

“Do you think two assassins with enough blood on their hands to cause a great flooding will succumb to your will? Do you think people change that much? Foolishness is not a virtue, neither is blind trust,” the Outsider snarls, making Corvo smile a little.

“When you burnt your Mark into my hand, it has blinded me for a moment.”

There is a tense pause in the air, and the Outsider Blinks away from Corvo to wander about a distant ledge, close enough for Corvo to hear him. And then he brings his hands to his chest’s level and something appears between his palms, shattered and broken and gleaming, the Twin-Bladed knife that Corvo must have in his luggage but seems to have misplaced it to the god.

“You carry not a weapon, but a burden, Corvo. The knife that has spilled my blood, making the bronze deadly, making this not just a weaponry trinket but a relic. I do wonder where it will end up. Stuffed in my chest by Daud’s hand or thrown aside by yours?”

“What would Billie do?” Corvo asks, and the Outsider glances at him with those Void-black eyes, hollows of the world.

“Billie Lurk will not reach your destination.”

The knife appears in Corvo’s hands, and the Outsider dissolves, leaving the man with more questions than he came with to the Void.

***

Corvo spends a considerate amount of time, twisting the blade in his hands, studying his reflection in the inches of bronze, mixed with the shards of the Void. Tousled hair and tired eyes. Hope and sadness in them, as he wishes to do something good in the world and yet misses the world he has left behind. Every day is marked with worry for Emily. Leaving her side makes him feel insecure, but when there is a desperate god in danger of being assassinated, Corvo simply can’t remain uninvolved.

For the rest of the trip the Outsider does not show up nor does he respond to Corvo’s silent pleas to meet. The subtle longing they have always experienced seems to have tensed up. There are so many reasons Corvo is aboard this ship, and the romantic yearning is one of them. How hard he must have fallen for the god, how deep those eyes have enthralled him. How lustful Corvo is to indulge in that connection, if only by holding the Outsider’s cold hands.

He only prays they won’t be cold when they reach the Void, one way or another.

***

To Corvo’s genuine dismay, he never gets to see Daud. The old man passes away after Billie brings him to the ship, while Corvo is out, hunting down black markets. He returns to all their possessions stuffed aside and the ship burning in the distance, black smoke rising and Billie’s tears falling as she stares at the horizon.

“In the underworld he was my father and my mentor. My teacher and my best friend,” she says loudly over the howling wind. Corvo looks at her, not the ship, the soft edged profile with the saddest eyes. She is not a Meagan Foster anymore, she is the assassin Billie Lurk and even now Corvo can smell Jessamine’s blood on her gloved hands.

Whatever happened all those years ago, there is a future binding them now, and Corvo wouldn’t tear that bond even if he wanted to. So instead of taking a ship back to Dunwall, Corvo follows Billie to an old abandoned apartment by the Royal Conservatory, overrun by the Overseers and the Blind Sisters as if it were plagued with rats and bloodflies. They lurk in and out, burning the many heretical items that are so despised and hated in their eyes. There are Abbey banners hanging down every wall, marking the building a cleansed place now. Billie is somewhere in its interior, seeking the map to the Shindaerey Peak, a lost quarry that no one has heard about, that no one believes existing but for the vague cult that Corvo still can’t quite lace.

For hours Corvo sits on an old mattress, replaying Daud’s last audiograph over and over until the words ingrain into his mind and echo in his ears. Every time he asks Billie to kill the Outsider, Corvo twists the knife on his finger, as if countering the words.

There is shouting outside, then an abrupt silence, and a few minutes later Billie climbs up into the balcony, hands empty and her jacket blood-stained. Corvo gets up immediately, but she waves her hand at him.

“I have dealt with everyone. I have enough contracts finished to allow us a passage to the Peak with enough supplies to last the journey,” she says, taking a pouch out of her jacket alongside a set of silvergraphs, small versions of the peak’s landscapes, a map with a marked location too. Corvo stares at the questionable treasure and nods, relieved for the ability to move on. Leaving Karnaca behind, leaving anything that connected him to Daud behind. Going up the mountain feels like cutting a healthy limb instead of a wounded one, surrounding himself with the odd place that is the lost and long forgotten quarry.

Billie and Corvo exchange few words on their way up to the destination. There is a subtle understanding between the two of them, one that makes Corvo wonder if she has shared it with Daud. It occurs to him that he barely knows anything about the assassin, his one image tainted with blood and killing and contempt. There is no man behind the red coat, Corvo realises, and, perhaps, it is one thing he comes to regret.

On the fourth day of their expedition, the Outsider’s vague prediction comes true. Corvo awakes to find no Billie by his side. No note, no lost supplies, not even a trace of her boots, as if Billie Lurk has vanished off the face of the world, never existed and was only the product of Corvo’s lonely imagination.

It feels surreal. In the end, Corvo blames the quarry’s proximity and everything odd that has to do with it. The things they have gathered, the excerpts from old journals, diaries, newspapers that could not for the love of the Void explain the strange disappearances and cracks in the world.

And when Corvo gets to the peak, he knows exactly what they meant.

This is a cursed place. A blessed place, a sacred place where sacrilege is happening. Roving about the place are the many cultists, the Eyeless as they call themselves. Dressed in dull finery, their faces tainted with rock and silver, they give Corvo a hard time, getting about the place and seeking the clues as to where the physical entrance to the Void is. He’d hoped the Outsider would be easier to reach if accessing him by simple talking, by calling for him by the shrines, but this, Corvo knows, is different.

And his wanderings about the quarry prove that. The conversations overheard, secrets whispered in the ears of the wretched faithful, the writings of old, the furtive messages that tell Corvo all about the terrible sad fate of a boy, now a changed and twisted man, trapped in the Void against his will, succumbed to the will of the cultists.

Corvo has never been an angry man. But there is a flash in his mind and it’s blinding white. He wishes he could remember how he ran through the quarry’s halls, killing everyone in his sight. He does remember the fading lights in their blind eyes, remembers their horrified whispers that the Void takes them and takes them not. They die in agony to the Twin-Bladed knife that takes lives, and takes, and takes. In the end, there remains nothing but a buzzing silence, broken by the ticking of alarm clocks and the wind, blowing through the cracks of this hole in the world.

But where lives end, pain and memory never does. And Corvo cries, drying tears on his face, when he tears the blocked door down to find the bitter truth of the Outsider’s Mark. His name. Carved away, bled away, whispered away to never be said aloud again. Corvo traces the drawing on the wall and looks at the black inked Mark on his hand, so vividly black, matching the Outsider’s onyx eyes.

From there, it’s a very different kind of path. Corvo finds an eye, quite a literal eye, staring at him bleedingly. It does not wish him to touch, and he doesn’t, instead employing the Outsider’s generous gift of the Dark Vision. Oh such wonders it reveals to Corvo… the world merged with the Void, two plains existing together in peace. And when he looks at it colourlessly, the Eye offers him to touch. And he does. And then the world is colourful like it has never been before.

More cultists to cut. Strange Envisioned, heaps of rock that has existed for millennia, as old as the Outsider, heartless silver and Void merged together, guarding the entrance to the Ritual Hold where the god rests. Corvo kills just one, no blood spilling, only the strange golden light that melts away seconds after. There is screaming when it happens, and Corvo knows that one of the original cultists is done for good. It’s justice done late.

Corvo runs. So fast, as fast as he has never run before. Past the Envisioned and the Eyeless, throwing the remainder of his grenades at them, hearing their screams through explosions. He does not regret the burnt down books or the lives taken. They have taken one, for which they must pay.

When running ends, Corvo sees a familiar kind of portal, a cut in the fabric of the Void, that calls for him, blinding him with brightness of old. He dives into it and falls in water that never soaks his knees, on rocks that never hurt his hands. It’s the Void as he has never seen it, with the whales floating by in the distance, singing loudly. Their presence is sentient, and Corvo knows they are watching from those small black eyes, as black as the Outsider’s. The last leviathan is held here.

The Twin-Bladed knife is truly a heavy burden in Corvo’s hands when he follows the path to the hold itself. Even from the distance he sees him… mouth open in agony and a body stuck in marble. He is surrounded with screams of the dead, their flickering souls never departed, tormenting the god that can do nothing for them, not here. Nowhere, because he does not care for it.

Among the lights of souls, Corvo sees one that stands out all too prominently. That familiar stance, one that he remembers even from a decade ago. The silver of hair. The scar that cut his face and made him into the assassin he is.

Daud. His mouth dry with memories of his mother, his eyes spilled with nothing but bitter regret.

How can Corvo persuade him to read the Outsider’s name, lost to the dead, lost to Daud who sits right across him?

“I forgive you.”

Sudden, but sincere words. The key?

“Forgiveness is a rare thing,” Daud says when Corvo crouches before him, steading him by the shoulders. There is little acknowledgement in whether or not Daud recognized him, but the way they stare at each other, the answer seems clear. Can Corvo truly forgive someone that has ruined his life, has taken his loved one away, destroyed everything he knew?

In the end, yes, he can. Deep inside he knows that Daud’s blade in Jessamine’s heart was not just a twist of pain, but a twist of fate, inescapable, unavoidable. What relative futures and presents existed would have led to something else entirely, but always to destruction. Here… the world has twisted. And by some strange decision of the fate, one that the Outsider never had his hand in, it led to the god, trapped here in the hold, agonized, silently screaming and dreaming himself into the reality, reaching out to those that made his existence more bearable. He knew that one day he’d day.

He didn’t know Corvo wouldn’t let it happen.

The name is whispered, and Daud’s body dissolves with a final farewell. And the Outsider falls away from the stone prison, right into Corvo’s arms, swept away to be held and never let go.

“Corvo… There is blood in my mouth. And a voice… Daud’s voice. My name. What you have done is impossible.”

Corvo looks at him, the god so impossibly heavy in his arms, his skin so humanely warm on the nape where Corvo cradles him. And those godly eyes, blackness of nothing draining away and leaving stark green eyes, emeralds that pierce Corvo with knowledge, gratitude, fear and… unending love.

Corvo looks back quietly, giving the Outsider what physical contact he can. There will be time for so much. For cradling, for kissing, for getting out of this cursed place, for abandoning the forgotten quarry. Taking a ship to Dunwall and letting the whole of the damn world know that the Void is empty and the devil is here. They might not realise it and no one will announce it either, but there will be a rumour that someone strange has arrived with the Lord Protector, their hands clenched together, their foreheads touching lovingly every now and then. And if the Tower maids are to be believed, even found kissing here and there, smiling like lovesick sweethearts.

But right now, there is only the Void. The whales singing celebratory songs that carry across all dimensions. And an empty prison, the god broken out of it, now made a man. A man in another man’s arms, a man in another man’s dreams. And that man, Corvo, would let the knife fall aside and die in the Void where it has no more meaning.

Today marks a very new age. And the Outsider’s Mark is now nothing more than a forgotten name whispered as the deadliest secret.

Corvo kisses the Outsider’s name off his lips. He likes it.


End file.
